Today, Nokia and Trolltech announced that Nokia will be purchasing Trolltech. Nokia will continue with Qt's dual license model, which was updated to GPL 3 only last week. In an open letter to KDE, the chief Trolls and Nokia VP asked for ideas and comments on improving their relationship with the open source community. Nokia will be applying to become a patron of KDE e.V. and the FreeQt foundation is being maintained to guarantee the continued freedom of the toolkit KDE depends upon. This change should help ensure both the continued longevity of Qt and KDE as well as give the platform a boost in industry, particularly in the consumer electronics industry.

Personally, I think Nokia bought Trolltech to prevent other companies from using QTopia on their phones, and really don't care about advancing Qt at all. They will probably also inevitably end up doing something to hurt us.

Well yeah, perhaps Nokia may want to use QTopia on their phones too, although they're currently not doing that. But in the process, it's probably good for their business to be the only one on the block with a stellar UI.

And heck, now that KDE Games have gone SVG, they'd look nice on their new phones :)

There's the fact Google's Android is a threat to Nokia, and so it makes sense for Nokia to embrace a similarly open source platform. Besides, phones are quickly becoming OS's, and OS/software vendors like Microsoft are quickly becoming phone developers. There are plenty of reasons for them to want to pickup things like Qt/KDE (with all their accomplishments, cross-platform support, nicer-(and, importantly, LIGHTER)-than-vista UI, etc.

Believe me, I've seen companies shoot themselves and their products in the foot enough to consider it a crime against the advancement of humanity, but it could be a good thing too. Time -- and only time -- will tell.

Of course they will. The open letter to the community that Lars points to in his blog explains the situation.
In short Trolltech commitment to KDE stays completely unchanged. Look at it from the very simple perspective: the amount of resources which Trolltech has at their disposal increases a lot due to the merger and that's something to be excited about.

I'm not happy about this. It's one thing to cooperate with a small company composed of engineers, programmers, hackers and software lovers, and a completely different thing to have the very heart of your desktop environment controlled by a multinational behemoth involved with software, telecommunications and a million other things, which started off as a cable manufacturer.

I had a far easier time trusting Trolltech than I do trusting Nokia. While things will probably stay pretty much the same in the short term (or even improve due to new funds), in the long run I'm not sure Nokia will care enough about Free Software or KDE to stop them from hurting the community if they deem it profitable.

well, I might add that small companies "composed of engineers, programmers, hackers and software lovers" usually aren't around for long. Those companies tend to go out of business quickly or become acquired by a "multinational behemoth". If they're lucky.

But still, I think you're mostly correct about the implications for KDE. We're no longer close to the Qt business model. KDE had a good leverage versus Trolltech because they knew well to thrive on KDEs success on the desktop. "Look how fancy things are done with our product". I wonder if Nokia cares so much...

Also I'm wondering whether the possibility exists of Nokia BSD'ing (or LGPL'ing) Qt, and whether this was good or bad. Clearly they don't need the turnover Trolltech achieves through Qt license sales.

Well, companies have the obligation to bring revenues to their share holders. Both big and small companies. So I don't understand this romantic view of small company composed of engineers and SW lovers... if you don't want a company to control your desktop (I don't see how Nokia could do so), use a Desktop that is not based on any technology owned by any company (I don't know if that is the case with Gnome).

Nokia started by doing paper and rubber boots. I don't think it is easy to find a company that reinvent itself as Nokia does. I just think this is positive, specially when thinking about the resources and the market penetration nokia has.

(1) was clearly not the reason for the acquisition, (2) probably much more so. what will probably happen is that TT gets aligned with the Nokia business operations and then everything which is not up to the efficiency threshold (sales people might be affected) will get cut away.

this way, Nokia has an in-hour alternative to Symbian, keeps Motorola from benefitting from TT (or acquiring the company themselves) and a nice staff of engineers who can be assigned to whatever software development they do inhouse. and that's prolly going to be quite a bit in the future (since the profit margins with hardware are much much smaller than with software).

16NOK per share is pretty much (i'd need to look it up) the issue price btw, it's not like you're gonna make big money with that.

This is a good observation. Most companies do not like to use a product developed by a competitor. This means that unless Nokia changes the license (to permit free commercial development by its competitors), Qt is quite unlikely to be used by other phone manufacturers.

You miss the point - it's not in the interests of other manufacturers to use Nokia's toolkit. Simple example: what if Ericsson needs a change to Qt to work on its new device? They have to go rely on their competitor to make the change to help them, which of course Nokia has every motivation not to do - and, on top of that, risk pre-notifying their competitor of their new device's feature in order to get the change, giving up a major competitive advantage (first to market). Smart management just does not put themselves in that position.

In the hypothetical: assuming Ericsson does not want to open source its drivers and all its software, it has to use the commercial version of Qt / Qtopia, which means it can't make its own changes, which means it has to ask Nokia to make the changes for it.

Since I don't have (and Trolltech for some reason does not publish) their commercial license I cannot confirm your summary or whether it would be adequate. One inadequacy, e.g., is that this license might change, including that the license fees might go up dramatically or this right you refer to to make changes goes away. And as I have noted before, there is no secondary market in Qt licenses (e.g., buying an off-the-shelf kit at Best Buy), which enables Nokia to price discriminate (charge some customers more than others, or plain refuse to license to someone). All very unattractive features when deciding on the platform for a hardware device.

Section 10 seems to deal only with trolltech's rights to audit out process to ensure we have the correct licenses, but it does have the following statement: Licensee does not implicitly grant Trolltech any form of license agreement.

I won't post the full agreement, it is likely protected by copyright laws. I'm pretty sure my company doesn't intend to modify QT, so I assume the above is generic terms they grant to everyone.

"You miss the point - it's not in the interests of other manufacturers to use Nokia's toolkit. Simple example: what if Ericsson needs a change to Qt to work on its new device? They have to go rely on their competitor to make the change to help them"

For starters, Qt is an open source platform, and secondly, I see few of Microsoft's competitors having a problem with Windows - and that's even worse.

"Qt may be open source but we are speaking about the commercial license."

So what? What is in Qt is what is in Qt. The open source version has the enterprise source code, and if you're a customer then you get the Qt source code as well.

"As to Microsoft, at this point there is little choice for most people, but it's not at all analogous."

Yes it is - certainly from what you're implying. These days Microsoft's competitors have no choice but to write software for Microsoft's platform and with their development tools, which means that Microsoft is first to market with everything. With Qt, that just isn't the case. If someone is really worried then they can use Qt for some things and not for others.

"A better analogy: Intel relying on AMD to write its microcode for its processors."

As long as they can get control over that microcode and write their own then it's not a problem and a pretty poor example.

LG Electronics
We are anticipating the unique features and functionalities that the S60 platform will bring to our product portfolio and look forward to working in the S60 community. Our target is to build ubiquitous mobile devices that will best serve our customers. S60 on top of the Symbian OS will provide us with a compatible platform for our smartphones throughout our CDMA, GSM/GPRS, and WCDMA portfolio.  Yong E. Shin, Vice President, UMTS Handset Laboratory, LG Electronics

Read more about LG at www.s60.com
Lenovo
The S60 platform, as an open and industry interoperable platform, best supports our innovations and product differentiation. It will provide Lenovo with one of the most optimal software platforms in the very competitive Chinese handset market.
 George He, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Lenovo

You're right: at IPO the price was fixed at NOK16/share. Which means that Nokia gets to acquire them at a bargain price now. And still its a generous offer, the shares were publicly traded at around NOK8 before Nokias stepped up.

- 'The loss before tax was NOK 4.6 million in the third quarter 2007'
- 'For the first nine months of 2007, the loss before tax was NOK 26.1 million and the net loss after tax NOK 31.0 million'

i think it's crystal clear that this is a purely strategic acquisition and whoever says that TT can just keep going on as they always did except that they have a lot more resources plainly doesn't understand how businesses work at this scale (thinking about the comment of 'zack rusin').

TT is interesting because of a nice engineering division but after the deal it's entirely up to Nokia what those people are working on. if Nokia decides that the manpower is more useful to them when working on embedded stuff instead of KDE stuff, then that's the last word.

some people never understand when it's time to drop the romantic hacker mentality and realize what it means to be working for (and adjusting to the preferences of) a highly profitable and very tough global enterprise like Nokia.

I might be mistaken, but I vaguely recall TT being profitable pre-IPO. It certainly wouldn't be surprising to see a company that went public push for expansion and growth over immediate profits, given the infusion of capital the IPO produces..

Huh. You're right. What the heck. I wonder why I thought that they were making a profit. That's... disturbing. When they were privately owned they must have made money, and lately they seem to be spending more and more, so I assumed they were in decent shape.

The stock exchange Q3 report also says: Positive EBITDA[1] of NOK 0.3 million. Sales has increased in the period, the report says. This shows that Trolltech is heading for profitability after a period of heavy investment.

When it comes to your "romantic hacker mentality" theory, science says something else. For years now researchers has studied the phenomena of free, libre and open source software. One such study is the Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study. The study reports:

Learn and develop new skills, and share knowledge and skills are major motivations for free software developers. The study[2] shows that the free software community is a rather young and predominantly male community with a strong professional background in the IT sector and a high educational level.

Finally, Nokia embraces open source technology and will take further the open source development culture found in Trolltech. FreeQt foundation is being maintained to guarantee the continued freedom of the toolkit KDE depends upon. Chief Trolls and Nokia VP are now asking for ideas and comments on improving their relationship with the open source community.

"Insane Coder" wrote: "So Nokia could continue to develop Qt for their cellphones, and for customers such as Adobe, and even release Windows only, or perhaps even Windows and Mac OS X builds of Qt both proprietary and under the GPL, but none for X11." This is the foundation of the critique in the blog post.

However there is a fundamental error here. The Agreement defines Qt as being Qt on the "KDE Window System" (a defined term), which is designated as the X Window System (X). Note that the agreement does not concern itself at all with Qt on Windows, Mac or the Linux frame buffer (except indirectly: a GPL Qt on X can be ported to these other platforms). So when you read "Qt" in the agreement, read it as "Qt on the X Window System" (the agreement is not just for Linux, it's for all U*xes).

So if Trolltech (or its successor) does not release an "Important Release" of Qt for X every year, or releases a non-free version of Qt on X without an equivalent free version within a year, the Foundation will have the right to release the latest release under BSD or other open source licenses.

You forget it's open source. It's already been ported to Mac OS X - so the great bulk of the work has been done, and the free software community could maintain the Mac OS (or Windows, or framebuffer) ports.

..and you forget that they can change the license to whatever they want
for future versions and if you think the FREE SOFTWARE community would
maintain something for a proprietary platform you have to be delusional.

There was a GPL Qt3 port to Windows. Basically the Qt framework is obviously modular to allow it to be ported to other platforms. So if you have Qt/X11, it's not too much work to make Qt/Mac or Qt/Windows.

In reality Nokia is a hardware company not a software company, so I see them becoming even more free about handing out licenses to Qt.

Actually, what I remembered is the following: (i) Qt for X is GPL and, due to the FreeQt agreement, has to remain that way; (ii) ports to Mac, Windows and FrameBuffer have been released under GPL; and (iii) even if these ports are no longer released under GPL in the future - i.e. the license on the other platforms changes - the past ports can be maintained (so you don't have to start from scratch).

The thing is that you/we/KDE have/has to maintain it which is a huge effort and will _at least_ slow development down immensely. It's not like the guys at TT will quit their jobs to work on the free versions of Qt.

Nokia did this move to have an answer to the Google phone I think. Therefore they need Qt and also Qtopia as a free and open alternative. Maybe they need to open it up even more, like under LGPL or BSD license.

What I personally may not even like, since the GPL is the best license to get further parties to contribute ....

You're missing a part of the picture here. Having Qt under the GPL is part of the business model which drives Qt development. Putting it under the LGPL would actually make things worse.

Consider the following:
1. release a beta version of a GPL toolkit
2. receive tons of feedback from KDE developers
3. process feedback to produce an enterprise-quality toolkit
4. release the final product, and commercial version
5. profit!
6. use the income to fund development and KDE developers
7. goto 1.

The model above drives the development of Qt, and has some interesting side effects:
- it's an upward spiral!
- Trolltech does lot of the heavy lifting, since Qt is their primary income.
They also do boring stuff developers wouldn't like to do unless they get paid.
- KDE gets an enterprise-quality toolkit in return.
- Trolltech is able to reach more customers and fund some KDE developers.

Also note the CEO of Trolltech explained recently how Trolltech became succesful because of KDE, not despite KDE. Customers are confident Qt is a good product since it's used to build a complete desktop environment, and often hear about Qt from KDE.

Putting Qt under the LGPL would break this model. It would hurt KDE too. Customers have fewer reasons to buy the commercial version, and there will be less income to fund development.

I'm not sure I'd agree with that. who exactly are you expecting to do the improving?

it would certainly lead to less money going to trolltech, which increases the risk of some talented developers finding themselves out of a job and having to go work on something other than qt/kde to pay the bills.

Motorola, IBM, and KDE develops. This depends on where Nokia wants to go with QT. If they just want to kill Google's (and Apple's) entry into the cell phone market, but don't want to get into monopoly trouble they may want to make QT open source in a BSD type license. In this case they may want to leave just enough Motorola around that regulators won't come looking at them. IF they go this route they may get rid of most of their qt developers (there will never be a qt5), keeping just those who work on parts they need for internal projects.

I can come up with lots of alternatives that they CAN do. I can't tell you what they will do. So long as I can use qt4 in my comercial developments I don't care.